Babies learn turn-taking much before they can speak

London, Jan 2 (IANS) Taking turns to respond to each other is a key part of conversation and babies learn the technique at around six months of age, long before infants know much about language, says a new study.

The speed of response white taking turns – about 200 milliseconds on average, about the same time as it takes to blink — is astonishing when we appreciate the slow nature of language encoding: it takes 600ms or more to prepare a word for delivery, the study said.

This implies a substantial overlap between listening to the current speaker and preparing our own response.

In human infants, turn-taking is found in the ‘proto-conversations’ with caretakers.

These infant-caretaker interactions are initially adult-like in terms of how fast infants can respond.

But as they develop into more sophisticated communicators, infants’ turn-taking abilities slow down, likely due to both learning more and more complex linguistic structures, and having to find a way to squeeze these into short turns, said researcher Stephen Levinson from Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands.

Levinson reviewed new research on turn-taking, focusing on its implications for how languages are structured and for how language and communication evolved.

He pointed out that turn-taking is common not only across unrelated cultures and language, the patter is also exhibited in all the major branches of the primate family – partly innate and partly learned in some monkeys, just as with human infants.

Even our nearest cousins the great apes take alternating turns in gestural communication, despite having a less complex vocal channel.

All of this suggests that humans may have inherited a primate turn-taking system, Levinson said.

This may have started out as a gestural form of communication, as with the other great apes, then later (about one million years ago) became one primarily expressed through the vocal channel, the study noted.